Many thanks to everyone who attended the Don’t Panic Guide to Social Media conference last Friday. We thought it was our best event yet and we were certainly blessed with a dream line up of speakers.
There were some great presentations too and some fascinating insights. A couple of points really struck me including Oxfam’s Sam Barratt quoting Plato ‘Those who control the stories rule society’ and Meg Pickard of The Guardian’s assertion that context, rather than content, is king.
Many years ago I did an 'A' Level in Communication Studies and dossed around a lot which is probably why I’m putting on events and not speaking at them. A few things did sink in though and the above points reminded me of the Marshall McLuhan quote ‘Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which they communicate than by the content of the communication’. He later put it a lot more snappily when he said ‘The medium is the message’.
I’m not saying I agree completely but the internet and things like blogs have given us all the opportunity to control the stories to some degree and those that used to talk at us are definitely having to learn to talk to us.
You can read more about the event from a delegates perspective on the blogs of Sherrilynne Starkie and Rob Skinner. I loved Rob’s observation on rude possibly being the new polite in relation to the amount of phone twittering and laptop use amongst delegates.
Stuart Bruce was one culprit, live blogging the morning session. It actually seems very apt given the conference subject and I do think delegate etiquette is changing.
I was also quite flattered that Stuart now kinda likes the fact we use song titles for most of our posts as he used to think we were just being willfully obscure...
OK, this is a lot shorter than I would have liked but we have another big event tomorrow so here’s The Plastic Ono Band.
Update: You can now read posts on the conference from Neville Hobson and Simon Wakeman.